Christmas Book Flood | Recommending reading

28 January

Book of the day

These casually drawn, on-point comic vignettes by the popular young Brooklyn-based artist Sarah Andersen are for the rest of us. They document the wasting of entire beautiful weekends on the internet, the unbearable agony of holding hands on the street with a gorgeous guy, and dreaming all day of getting home and back into pyjamas.

In other words, the horrors and awkwardnesses of young modern life. Oh and they are totally not autobiographical. At all.

Sarah’s frankness on personal issues like body image, self-consciousness, introversion, relationships, and the frequency of bra-washing makes her comics relatable and funny.

Facts of the day

28 January

1807 London’s Pall Mall is the first street in the world to be lit by gaslight.

New Year

Google Maps ran an online project called Zeitgeist in 2013 that invited internet users from around the world to share their resolutions. Then, Google mapped them and analysed them, breaking them down into the following categories: health, love, career, finance and education.

Looking at the map, health-related resolutions predominated in the US and Egypt. Visitors from Australia and Japan were looking for love. In Russia, meanwhile, education was the top priority. And in India, career goals were king.

Book

Thomas Hobbes, author of Leviathan (published in 1651) – who famously described human life as ‘nasty, brutish and short’ – lived to be 91 years old.